History will never be the same again: The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark

On the morning of Sunday June 28, 1914, a fanatical Serbian nationalist called Gavrilo Princip fired two pistol shots at point-blank range into a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria through the streets of Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia-Herzogovina.

The first bullet struck the Archduke, the heir to the Habsburg Empire, in the neck; the second hit his wife Sophie, who was sitting beside him. Both shots were fatal. Just one month later, Europe was plunged into a cataclysmic conflict that was to cost the lives of more than 16 million people.

How on earth did a political assassination sparked by obscure Balkan rivalries become the catalyst for the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli?

EUROPE'S 'BEST HOPE': Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in 1914, an hour before they were shot dead

The victorious allies insisted that the Central Powers, above all Germany, accept responsibility – and an assumption of German guilt has been indelibly woven into the historical narrative ever since. Is this fair? Christopher Clark thinks not, and the arguments he sets out in this quite superb account of the causes of the First World War are so compelling that they effectively consign the old historical consensus to the bin.

Consider Clark’s analysis of how Britain came to be sucked into the war. I had always believed that it was the Kaiser’s decision to build a fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy that forced us to forsake our policy of continental detachment and enter into alliance with France and Russia.

If you like this, why not try:

1914-1918: The History Of The First World War by David Stevenson, (Penguin £12.99, ☎ £10.99 inc p&p)

Not so, says Clark. He argues convincingly that British admirals never believed that the German surface fleet was capable of challenging their dominance of the seas, and the events of the Great War were to prove them right. The impulse behind Britain’s decision to sign up to the Franco-Russian alliance was not fear of Germany, but fear of Russia. Russia was our great imperial competitor, and Russian interests in Persia and Afghanistan threatened the security of British India. Better to have Russia as a friend and Germany as an enemy than the other way round, British policy-makers reasoned.

‘The First World War was the Third Balkan War before it became the First World War,’ writes Clark. This will surprise readers unaware that there had even been a first and second Balkan war, let alone a third, but without an appreciation of how these bitter regional conflicts came to create what Clark calls a ‘geopolitical trigger’ in Europe’s most unstable region, it’s impossible to grasp how and why the assassination in Sarajevo led to an unprecedented global conflagration.

The catalyst for the Balkan wars was Italy’s apparently painless seizure of the Ottoman province of Libya in 1911. Ottoman Turkey had been the ‘sick man’ of Europe for as long as anyone could remember, but now the patient was in a terminal coma. Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece all followed Italy’s lead and helped themselves to Turkish territory in Macedonia and Albania, before falling out among themselves.

How on earth did a political assassination sparked by obscure Balkan rivalries become the catalyst for the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli?

Serbia, with Russian support, emerged the big winner, and the regional balance of power was fatefully altered. Exultant Serbian nationalists now plotted to provoke a war with Austria-Hungary and seize Bosnia, which they regarded as theirs by historical right. Tragically, they succeeded.

The awful irony is that Franz Ferdinand, the victim of Sarajevo, was, in Clark’s words, Europe’s ‘best hope for peace’. He was not particularly likeable, but he was politically astute and resolutely opposed to war.

His great friend, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, also emerges with more credit than normal. He seems to have tried his utmost to avert a European conflict. There were, it is true, German hawks who wanted to use Sarajevo as an excuse to launch a ‘preventive’ war against France and Russia, but there were militarists motivated by the same logic in Paris, St Petersburg and even London.

Clark’s history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, was a masterpiece. The Sleepwalkers surpasses it. It’s not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history.